Postcode

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Postcode: the splintering of a nation
By Wayne Swan
Pluto Press, $26.95

Affluenza
By Clive Hamilton and Richard
Denniss
Allen & Unwin, $24.95

Like artists who flourish best in a garret, dire political
predicament seems to provoke great literary ambition in a certain
breed of MP. There have been a spate of books - or should we call
them manifestos? - in recent years from the Labor side. The latest
to outline his "vision thing" is shadow treasurer Wayne Swan, who,
one suspects, is out to prove to a less than adoring public that
there is a heart connected to that hard head.

Books by serving politicians, however, are always problematic.
They write most interestingly - and probably honestly - when
they're out of power. Otherwise, to what extent can we be assured
they set out a point of view unconstrained by Machiavellian motive?
The mini-library Mark Latham produced before he self-immolated
appeared to be all about fertilising his leadership aspirations;
his next release, as Mr Average witha political bone to pick, looks
far more digestible. From the start, there is a fair bit of
personal myth-making going on in Postcode. The aim is lofty
- to dissect the "splintering of a nation" under the weight of
unequal distribution of wealth - but Wayne Swan's treatise begins
with a George Washington-ian perspective as he recalls his
childhood all those years ago in regional Queensland.

"I walked to school along the narrow-gauge sugar train tracks,
barefoot and sucking a stick of cane," he writes with a supremely
purple flourish. "It was a place of greenness and idyll and
wonder."

Thankfully, he does not feel the need to declare that he could
not tell a lie.

Yet, while parts of this book read like a windy political
speech, it would be a disservice to dismiss it as just a vanity
project. Cut through the swathe of personal pronouns, and Swan, a
former university teacher, has some important things to say about
inequality in modern Australia.

His basic argument, informed by six solid years as the
Opposition's family and community services spokesman - where he
rose above his apparatchik reputation as a former Queensland ALP
state secretary - is that the spoils of prosperity over more than a
decade have been unevenly spread.

New forms of disadvantage have emerged, he argues, marshalling a
well-researched array of fact and figures from a range of sources
to prosecute his case. Poverty, he notes, is "often concentrated in
forgotten postcodes full of people who are invisible until
something goes wrong".

Railing against a dominant political culture that exhorts the
masses to dob in a "dole bludger" and characterises a good many
disability pensioners as merely bad-back sufferers, he suggests the
fight for a fair society must remain at the core of ALP values.
Now, if only more of his Labor mates would see it that way.

With a politician's fine appreciation of the new battleground in
John Howard's Australia, Swan's concerns are not merely for the
poor and marginalised. He finds time, too, for the "many struggling
middle-Australians" whom he claims are beginning to wonder when
they will see some of the benefits of economic growth. And, lest
anyone doubt Labor's economic mainstreamism, he maintains the best
mechanism for lifting everyone up remains the market - with a
caveat from political speech writing 101 - "it must be a capitalism
that delivers for everyone".

Swan is the consummate political insider, but economist Clive
Hamilton, executive director of the Australia Institute, is a
consummate cage-rattler, a provocateur who invests less faith in
the virtues of the market. Often characterised as "left wing" - a
misnomer - under Hamilton's media-savvy leadership, the
Canberra-based institute has been behind a recent push to embrace a
utopian "new politics" that emphasises well-being over material
progress. Affluenza, co-written by the institute's deputy
director Richard Denniss, takes aim at what it sees as the
ever-expanding middle, offering a passionate polemic against a
scourge of over-consumption and the "mania of maximising economic
growth".

The book's title is coined from a late-'90s US documentary, that
spawned a bestselling book of the same name. That in part is
Hamilton's talent - he is a populariser and distiller of big ideas
wherever he sources them.

Affluenza is a lively read with a punishingly compelling
tone - sometimes it feels like indulging in a bout of
self-flagellation as it outlines society's excesses; our oversized
houses, our ridiculously expensive designer sunglasses and our pets
who, in this vision, are inevitably over-indulged.

Most Australians, Hamilton insists, are surrounded by abundance
and we lack the will rather than the ability to fix poverty at the
margins. The route to eliminating "real deprivation", he says, is
to first to tackle "the problem of affluence, imagined
deprivation".

It's an idea, however, that's unlikely to overly engage our
political literati any time soon.